home network file sharing--can't add a new computer

[nikuki]

I've been trying to add a laptop to my home network in order to share file and especially a printer.

The network currently consists of one XP Pro and one ME machine.
Sharing is working fine on both.

My network is wireless via a Linksys router.

The laptop (XP Home) can access the internet just fine, but I can't make it see the other computers in the workgroup. I have mirrored the settings from the XP Pro machine to no avial.

The network is using NetBui protocol.

If there is anything I may have overlooked, please let me know... I've run out of ides on this one...

If you need more info, let me know what you need


Thanks.

[bentkey]

I would suggest that you dump the Netbeui protocol and use only tcpip. You can run into binding problems where one machine is trying to communicate via Tcpip and another is talking Netbeui. Windows95 and 98 would only listen on the first protocol in the binding stack Me may do the same and I have no idea about XP. You must have tcpip to access the Internet anyway, and Microsoft is not supporting Netbeui anymore, it is only included with xp for backward compatibility. But for sure, if you didn't explicitly install Netbeui on the laptop, it's not there.

[nikuki]

I did explicitly istall NetBui on the laptop. I want to use it because it is more secure. (Correct me if i'm wrong)

[bentkey]

You're wrong. Netbeui is the easiest protocol for garbage to travel from machine to machine from within your network. Does nothing to protect you from the Internet. Causes lots of trouble when combined with other protocols. Lazy network administrators used to enable it because they didn't understand how to work with tcpip and make machines resolve their internal names correctly. It was always a bad idea. Back when machines were slow tcpip was panned because it took a lot more processor overhead to drive it, and Netbeui was a fast, no configuration, protocol. That notion is dead today.